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May 4, 1999
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Vol. 109·No.144
The Kansas Women's rowing team recorded two sixth place finishes Sunday at the Midwest Rowing Championships in Madison, Wis.
SEE PAGE 1B
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THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
Tornadoes blast Midwest
Rows of houses destroyed, hundreds injured during storm
（USPS650-640）
The Associated Press
OKLAHOMA CITY — A half-mile wide tornado tore through the central part of the state last night, wiping out whole neighborhoods, killing at least 24 people and injuring hundreds.
"I heard it; the house started shaking and then the big rumble," said 74-year-old Katherine Burch, who hid in the bathroom of her southwest Oklahoma City home during the storm. "Glass and everything flew in it."
"We are getting so many injuries. We are just tagging them and bringing them in," said Shara Findley, spokeswoman for Hillcrest Health Center in Oklahoma City. "We're getting everything you can think of."
Police and emergency workers combed through the debris as darkness fell, searching for survivors. Crumpled cars littered two highways.
in southwest Oklahoma and stretching northeast. Damage was reported with some of the storms, but none were as devastating as the one that tore through the Oklahoma City metropolitan area.
Four people were killed in Midwest City, just southeast of Oklahoma City, according to Ben Frizzell, spokesman for the state Office of Emergency Management.
Television reports showed hundreds of destroyed homes. Heavy damage was reported in Moore, east of Oklahoma City, where rows of houses were destroyed and scores of trucks overturned.
Midwest Regional Medical Center said it was treating at least 100 injured.
The tornado was one of several that formed during a five-hour period, beginning
Natural gas leaked from several locations last night. Power lines and piles of carpet were everywhere
"It's gone." LeeAnn Richardson said as she looked toward where her home once stood.
Richardson said she and others were watching the weather on television when they decided to run into the storm cellar after clouds rolled in and rain poured down. Sixteen people and four pets were in the cellar with her, All survived without injury.
The twister was first reported about 5:50 p.m. but had not caused significant damage to homes until moving closer to Oklahoma City.
Power lines popped and debris flew as the twister moved along from Chickasha, about 35 miles southwest of Oklahoma City, and cut through the heavily populated Oklahoma City metro area.
Lawrence area gets its share of severe weather
Frequent lightning lit up the sky, heavy rain fell and wind gusts of more than 60 miles per hour blew through Lawrence between 11 p.m. and midnight yesterday.
A National Weather Service spokesman in Topeka said that there were no reports of tornadic activity in the area, although there were reports of wind gusts up to 75 miles per hour in Wyandotte County, Osage City and Scranton. Wind gusts up to 65 miles per hour were reported near Clinton Lake, he said.
Lt. Ed Brunt of the Lawrence Police Department said that there were reports of power lines down at 23rd Street and
Harper Avenue, and at 5th and Missouri streets. There was also a report of a tree fire in the 900 block of 21st Street, which was put out quickly. Brunt said.
Sgt. Anthony Augusto of the KU Public Safety Office said that there were a few tree limbs down on campus but that there were no major weather-related problems.
The area was under a severe thunderstorm warning from about 11 to 11:30 p.m. Douglas County, including Lawrence, remained under a tornado watch, issued until 5 a.m. today, at press time.
— Chris Fickett
Harvest of dreams organic farming
Story by Dan Curry • Photos by Augustus Anthony Piazza
Some farmers struggle to raise earth-friendly crops
rost came late.
All seven varieties of his organically grown greens froze to death in Robert Hickerson's garden.
Robert Hickerson, Lawrence resident, examines a garlic plant on his farm. Hickerson has spent the last four years operating an organic farm.
Hickerson kept his chin up. For him, small-scale disasters turn up as often as Sundays.
After quitting a Ph.D. program in art history four years ago to run an organic farm, Hickerson has become a man undaunted by minor defeats. Growing vegetables without insecticides, pesticides, fungicides or herbicides is a trial-and-error process.
That's why the frozen loss didn't worry him, he says, as he steps over an irrigation ditch that once watered the ill-fated greens.
After the frost, he says, he still had the rare Cherokee Red tomatoes coming up, a field full of knee-high sweet corn to attend to, and watermelons, the kind that would grow large and crush toes, strain backs and arms—the blue ribbon heavy-rollers people would lust for come July. Produce that would tide him over to the next season.
No one farms because they're lazy, and nobody goes organic to get rich. Organic farming is as much a lifestyle as a way of growing produce, and that's why farmers like Hickerson, who fight blight and insect alike without the standard-issue chemical arsenal, swallow their losses and press on. Other farmers say convincing consumers to pay extra cash for the concept of an organic tomato is more a racket than a religion.
Hickerson says he bought this farm—137 acres of timber, cultivable land, a creek and a dug-out bomb-shelter shack
Some organic farmers fail. Others discover marketing.
for a house- to get his hands on a field full of the best earth in Kansas, he says
He treads upon this field unobtrusively, sometimes barefoot out of a rev
erence for soil that crumbles into cocoa powder at a touch.
"I checked underground water tables, soil tables, crop prediction charts," he
says. "Looked at over 100 farms before I bought this place."
The field is moist, but not muddy. Hickerson's two dogs, zig-zagging in and out of the woods, leave perfect paw-prints in the soil.
"The first step in the organic process is the dirt," Dickerson says. "If you take care of your dirt, you have less inputs later."
Instead of spraying chemicals to clear th fields or adding fertilizer to enrich the soil, Hickerson plows the weeds into the ground each time they pop up.
Earlier last spring, Hickerson crawled a half mile on his hands and knees seeding the watermelon rows. The melons waxed fat from the fish emulsion that Hickerson had sprinkled for fertilizer and grew unruly as Hickerson weeded each by hand.
It's labor-intensive weed-control, he savs. But it's ecologically sound.
By all accounts, the melons should have been fine, the sweet corn a success.
Then the sun came out, the rain dried up, and the melons shriveled like tired balloons.
Then locusts swarmed and devoured the tassels of the sweet corn. With his hands bound by the requirements of organic farming, Hickerson watched as his corn rows became a series of castrated stalks, unable to produce even a pocketful of kernels.
Only the bulbous, Cherokee Red tomatoes remained, which his customers found unseemly.
Demand dropped; Hickerson took what he could get.
"I felt like I had an X on my back," he says. "Everything I planted turned to shit."
Now, as he crouches to inspect a new season's garlic crop, knowing he lost more than he made last year, he recalls the lessons he learned from the previous year's failures.
"I ita n't easy, and it ain't cheap," he says. "Farming teaches you to take a
See PATIENCE on page 8A
Evening storms wreak havoc in Wichita area
The Associated Press
WICHITA — Tornadoes ripped through south Wichita last night, damaging dozens of homes and killing at least six people, officials said.
One of the fatalities occurred when a building collapsed in Wichita, the MidAmerica News Network reported.
Six people had been confirmed dead last night, said Fred Irvin of the Sedgwick County Emergency Preparedness Office.
Irwin said multiple injuries were reported in both Wichita and Haysville.
"There are just too many (injuries) to give an estimate at this point," Irvin said. "More and more are coming in by the minute."
several mobile homes in south Wichita were blown into a lake and several other homes were damaged, Irvin said. At least one of the deaths was in the mobile home park, he said.
I here also was a report of a major natural gas line leak in south Wichita, where some homes were being evacuated.
The storms, which included high winds and heavy rains, hit the area about 8:30 m. Irvin said.
"It it seems as if more than one tornado touched down," Irvin said. "They seemed to have hit in spotted areas in south and southwest Wichita."
I have no trailer, "Harris said. "We all rolled in it. It was the worst experience in my life."
The county declared a state of local emergency disaster about 9:30 p.m. Power lines and trees were reported down throughout the county. There were also reports of scattered power outages, Irvin said.
A mobile home owned by Chad Harris, 19, was rolled over by the tornado and demolished with eight people inside.
Oenieurs were set up at a National Guard Armory and a Wichita school.
People in the trailer were in critical condition. Two teenagers whose house was destroyed by a tornado were trapped in their basement for about half an hour until the storm subsided.
"Right now I'm in a state of shock," said 15-year-old Jessie Karr. "You never picture this is going to happen to you."
Jessie said she saw the roof blown off her house. She said it was kind of like action movies.
"I got hit in the head by a lawn chair." she said.
Her 13-year-old sister, Courtney, said she saw the bay windows in the house cave in and the tornado swirling inside the house.
"I was freaked out at that point. I was scared for my life," Courtney said. "I've seen it on TV, but seeing it with my own eyes, tearing up my own home ... it is hard to explain."
Eager shoppers find the Force with Star Wars merchandise
By Jennifer Roush
jroush@kansan.com
Kansas staff writer
Star Wars fans, collectors and others invaded toy stores yesterday just after the stroke of midnight to get their hands on merchandise from Star Wars: Episode 1
— The Phantom Menace. The movie will be released in theaters nationwide May 19.
Fans across the nation had been anticipating the toys' release for months and were salivating for any look at the vast array of Star Wars-related merchandise.
For many fans, it was literally a trip to the dark side: People waited in line in places like Lawrenceville, N.J., Boise, Idaho, and Tulsa, Okla., in the middle of the night Sunday for stores to open at midnight.
Then, just after midnight, "Man. did it go!" said Mark Breller, the sales floor manager at the Lawrenceville, N.J., Toys-R-Us.
"People were grabbing the action figures off the shelves as fast as they could, filling entire shopping carts with them. One guy bought 100 of the battle droids. He said he was going to set up a battle scene." Brraler said.
At a Wal-Mart in Tulsa, Okla., one collector offered store employees $1,000 for a *Star War* promotional sign. At the Boise Toys-R-U.S., shoppers purchased the equivalent of a 4-foot tractor-trailer of the movie toys.
When Earth's single sun rose yesterday morning, another wave of fans and collectors stormed retailers across the country to buy the most popular action figures, including 12-inch Darth Maul villains, Jar Binks space creatures and a Jabba the Hutt that spews green play gel ("It's food for Hutts, not humans," the box warns).
But here in Lawrence, demand was somewhat more subdued.
19.4
See FANS on page 2A
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